White House Down

Roland Emmerich’s face wore an easy expression of carefree calm as he strolled onto the patio of his Hollywood Hills home. The German director had just come from a morning screening of his new action movie “White House Down,” which blasts into theaters Friday. He’d been carefully listening to the final mix of the thundering soundtrack — a symphony of explosions, gunfire and shattering glass — and for the most part, he was happy, though a few remaining imperfections nagged at the corners of his smile. “Everybody who makes movies, they say you can never, ever finish a movie, you can only abandon it, no matter how much time you have,” Emmerich said. When Leonardo da Vinci stated, “Art is never finished, only abandoned,” he wasn’t necessarily referring to big-budget summer popcorn movies, and even the kindest critics might be […]